


Death's Outlet (Song of Life)

by myaimistrue



Category: Dead Poets Society (1989)
Genre: Angst, Boys In Love, Canonical Character Death, Discussions of Suicide, Dreams, Dreams vs. Reality, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:40:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26114314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myaimistrue/pseuds/myaimistrue
Summary: Todd struggles to cope after Neil's death. Neil visits.
Relationships: Todd Anderson & Neil Perry, Todd Anderson/Neil Perry
Comments: 8
Kudos: 15





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d" by Walt Whitman.

Snow is gently falling. The muffled melody of the flakes colliding with the ice-beaten ground is so comforting.

“Todd?”

I turn, and there you are. Smiling just like you used to, in our first moments and some of our very last. Your smile always seemed like it was warring against your face, it was so big and impossibly bright; I can’t believe I’m seeing the battle again.

Breathlessly, I manage to say, “How are you here?”

“I wanted to see you.” Your hands are gloveless, and Puck’s crown rests carefully on your head, but other than that, this could be any night, any moment in the snow. Like nothing ever happened. “I miss you.”

“Why did you do it, then?” I say, the anger surprising me in its quickness. “It never had to be like this. You  _ chose _ this, Neil.”

“It was a mistake,” You whisper. Every word from your mouth has enough meaning to give itself weight, make it tangible in the air between us. I could almost reach out and touch each one of them. “I thought I was trapped. I… I thought I wouldn’t get through it. I needed a way out.”

“You had us! You had  _ me _ !” My voice cracks embarrassingly, but it doesn’t seem to matter. “You weren’t alone. You weren’t, I could’ve helped you.”

“I know.” A perfect tear slips down your cheek, and it occurs to me just how beautiful you are, even now, even in grief and agony. “I’m so sorry, Todd, I am. I’m so sorry.”

I can’t take any more. I reach out, and you’re reaching out too, and we embrace.

“Don’t say any more about that,” I say into the crook of your neck. “Please, don’t.”

“I won’t.” You take a deep breath. I know that I feel your chest rise and fall, and I know that I feel your freezing cold hands slip underneath my coat collar. I know that this is your body in my arms. This is happening. “I’m so happy to see you.”

And it’s enough. Holding you, being held, is enough. You feel the same. You smell the same, like that starchy detergent they wash our clothes with and cinnamon; you used to always put a sprinkle of it in your coffee.

It feels like coming home. I feel like I’m home.

I’m awake, suddenly, in the darkness of our room. Instinctively, I look over to your bed, and find it empty. It’s immaculately made; no one has touched it since you last made it up the morning of the play, your very last morning. Even when your weeping mother came to collect your things, all she could do was take the box I gave her, which was missing all your poems, and sob out her thanks. I tried to comfort her, but she wouldn’t stay. Your father never even came at all.

I touch my face and realize that I’m crying. All I can think, all I can  _ feel _ , like a never-ending echo in my mind, is that I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. I miss you.

My entire life has been untethered since you died. Nothing feels right. No poem, no classroom, no moment. I take a walk and wonder if your feet ever touched the same ground I’m walking on. I read a novel and wonder what you’d think of it. I write a poem and wonder how you would smile if you read it. If it would be excited, or sweet, or soft. If you would lean and kiss me.

Something hits the window. I sit up, shaken from my reverie. Then, after a few moments, I hear it again.

Slowly, I get out of bed. The wood floors are freezing on my bare feet as I creep to the window. Outside, it’s spring. Welton is green now; I can barely walk through the forest anymore because of how overgrown it’s become. I’m especially fond of the wildflowers.

I look out at the empty quad, and someone is standing just out of the light beneath my window. It’s too dark to make out who it is, but they’re looking up at me. My breath catches in my throat.

The figure steps into the light. I recognize the scarf. I recognize the gloveless hands, and the crown. The crooked smile. I recognize you.

I stare, completely unable to understand how I’m seeing you. Slowly, you raise your hand in greeting. Our eyes are locked together. I’m afraid to blink, afraid that you’ll be gone when I open my eyes again.

You motion for me to come down. And what can I do? What can I do but what you ask me?

I pull my shoes on as quickly as I can, stumbling over my robe as I do so. My heart is pounding. It’s like that first night we snuck out, the thrumming of anxiety and anticipation running all the way through to my soul. 

I thunder down the steps. I don’t worry about someone hearing me, or about getting caught. All that I can think about is getting to you. I think if I get down there quickly enough, I’ll be able to hear your voice like I heard it in the dream.

I burst out into the warm spring night. A breeze rustles through the trees, through my hair. There’s no one out here. The patch of light where you stood under my window is empty. Everything is so quiet.

I look around for a few moments in vain, as if you’re hiding somewhere, and come to terms with the fact that I didn’t really see you at all. I wish more than anything I did, that you aren’t Puck, but Romeo. You’re Romeo, standing under my balcony, only pretending to be dead, deserting the play to come back to me. 

I’m about to go back to our room, resigned to the fact that I made all of it up. That I’m still not ready to let you go. But then I see, in a small pile on the ground near where you stood, rocks. Pebbles small enough to throw at a window and not shatter it.

My hands shake as I pick them up. I know you touched them. I know you were here, now.

“Neil?” I stand there, waiting to feel something, to see something. There’s nothing. “Are you here?”

But there’s no hint of you. Finally, I go back to our room, unsure of how to feel. I’d fully believe I hallucinated it all if not for the pebbles I put in a little pile on my desk. And your face, the way the light hit it, the way you smiled at me; I don’t know that I’m creative enough to make that up. I know I can’t write anything to capture how you looked in that moment.

I lay in bed, tossing and turning. I pray that when I do fall asleep, you visit me again, if that was a visit from some other place. But when I finally do drift off, Neil, my sleep is dreamless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been working on this one for a long time. I love this movie so so so much, and I wanted to try and do something interesting with it. I have a lot of ideas, so I hope y'all like it!
> 
> Comments and kudos are deeply appreciated!


	2. Chapter 2

Knox is the only one who notices anything different about me the next day. Meeks and Pitts spend the whole day arguing back and forth about something they’re tinkering on, and as we sit in the common room that night, they continue bickering under their breath. Knox watches me carefully as I do my calculus homework that he’s also supposed to be working on.

“Todd?”

“Yeah?”

“Something seems strange about you.”

I glance at him. “I’m alright, Knox.”

“Are you?” His eyebrows knit together, and I feel a pang of affection for him. Charlie got shipped off to some school in Europe, Mr. Keating’s at his new job, and while Knox doesn’t understand me the way they did (the way  _ you  _ did), he might be the only person left who could get close. 

“I’m…” I sigh. “I’m just tired. I had a dream that woke me up last night.”

“What was it about?”

“I saw…” My courage fails. It feels so wrong to say your name out loud to our friends, like sacrilege. Another of my many sins. 

But Knox knows who I’m talking about. I think he might have some idea of why your death is so much harder for me than anyone else, but he’s had the grace not to bring it up in any real way. I think he might be afraid to. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” I try for a smile, and look down at his paper, full of chicken-scratched figures and eraser shavings. “Do you want some help with that?”

“Do you mind?” He says sheepishly.

I spend the rest of the night walking Knox through our homework and rolling my eyes at Meeks and Pitts. It’s so normal, so typical and familiar; when we all go back to our rooms, I’ve almost managed to forget about you. But then I see your bed, still perfectly made, and the pebbles in a pile on my desk.

They seemed magical last night, a message from the beyond, a sign that some part of you was still here at Welton with me. Now, looking at them in the harsh light of my desk lamp, they seem almost cruelly ordinary.

It occurs to me, not for the first time and probably not for the last, that I might be cracking. Some day, I’ll eventually snap, and I won’t just be the Anderson disappointment, I’ll be the Anderson shame. My mother’s bridge club friends will whisper to one another behind her back about the son that just never was quite right after his “friend” died. I’ll be locked away at some institution upstate. My only visitors will be my parents on holidays, and maybe some of the remaining Dead Poets. I’ll waste away there, seeing your ghost around corners and outside of windows until I finally die myself.

I know, it’s bleak. If you heard me say all of that, I think you’d laugh right in my face. You’d make a joke of it. You’d tell me to lighten up and stop worrying so much when I know that I’m not crazy, I’m just grieving. You’d kiss me and pull away too soon, laughing again.

How many times did you do that? How many times did you reach down into my self-constructed pit of anxiety and melancholy to offer a hand? I can’t remember how I dealt with it before you. Just having you nearby always made me feel more at ease, safer.

I hope to God you felt that way about me. Because now I know, now I know that you were going through so much more than you ever let on to me, so much that I only ever glimpsed in a flash of your eyes or the way you clenched your hands together. In all of the nights we stayed up talking, at first in our separate beds, and then in one another’s arms, in all of those long conversations about every dream and fear and hope, you never once told me how close you were to what you did. Never once did you tell me your father owned a gun.

I lay back in my bed and stare at the ceiling. Neil, could I have helped you? Maybe if I had asked the right question in the right tone, if I had kissed you more, if I hadn’t let your father drag you away after the play. If if if.

We’re on a stage. The set pieces from your play surround us, but they’re in no order, cast in strange shadows; a single spotlight shines on us standing centerstage. 

“I’m sorry.”

“About what?”

“Last night.” You frown. “It’s strange, Todd, to come through like that.”

“That wasn’t real,” I say softly. It’s like I’m breaking the news to you. “ _ This  _ isn’t real. It’s a dream.”

“And this weak and idle theme/No more yielding but a dream/Gentles, do not reprehend/If you pardon, we will mend.” You say, and grin. Like an echo, I can hear the sound of those lines as you delivered them, those beautiful final moments of the play. Your beautiful final moments.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that dreams can be just as real as reality, if you let them be.”

I’m angry suddenly. You keep smiling at me like you know something I don’t, like you heard a wonderful secret and you’re holding it over my head. “Neil, I don’t understand any of this.”

“Neither do, I. Not really.” You reach out and take my hand in yours. Our fingers lace together so easily, the muscle memory as strong as it ever was. “I know this is strange. But Todd, being here with you…”

“I know.” I say, because I do know. I know that real or not, this is the closest I’ve been to myself in a long time. So I give in, just a little, and I kiss you.

Your lips move against mine slowly, carefully, and you pull me closer. My heart flutters like a little bird, the gilded cage finally opening up, releasing it back into the mountains and valleys where it belongs. Freedom.

I don’t care about any of it, I decide. If this is a dream, if this is reality, if you’re dead or alive or a ghost or a demon, I don’t care- all I want is this, you and I, the feeling of your hand on my cheek, the taste of you on my tongue. Neil, the poems I could write about this.

You pull back, and there are tears in your eyes. You laugh, a watery, sweet little laugh, and wipe your thumb across my cheek. I suppose I’m crying too. “Look at us. What babies.”

“I love you,” I say, hoping my voice won’t betray me and break over the words. “I love you so much.”

“I love you too.” But your tearful smile is fading. And then, you’re looking at me with something like agony. I’ve never seen anything like it in your expression before, and it’s frightening. I wonder, absently, if this is what you looked like when you brought the gun to your head.

“Neil? What is it?”

“I… I’m so sorry.” You start to cry. It’s not like it was only moments ago, the emotion isn’t overwhelming you; you sound like you’re in physical pain. Like someone is twisting a knife in your chest. “I’m so sorry.”

I don’t know what to do. I watch impotently as you drop down to the ground, as you bury your face in your hands. Every sob is like a scream. 

I drop down to my knees in front of you. “It’s alright. Please, Neil, it’s alright. Don’t cry.”

“I…” You look up at me. “I didn’t want this. There’s- there’s so much I wanted to do. Things I- I needed to say.”

I pull you into my arms, and you bury your face in my shoulder, you cling to me like a child. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“I can’t- I can’t go back, Todd.” You sob out, muffled in the material of my sweater.    
“Please, let me- me go back.”

“I’m so sorry.” I whisper. “I’m sorry.”

If my heart could break any more, it is. It is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, we've got some big plot stuff coming up! It won't just be angst forever :)
> 
> I hope you liked this chapter. Leave a comment or a kudos if you did!


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